Mao: The Unknown Story — Jung Chang & Jon Halliday

Chang and Halliday's biography of Mao draws on extensive interviews and previously unavailable archives in China, Russia, and the West to argue that the official narrative of the Chinese revolution is substantially false. The Mao they depict is less a sincere ideologue than a cynical manipulator who understood power as an end in itself and treated the Chinese people as instruments of it. The book generated considerable academic controversy, but the evidence base is more substantial than its critics have generally acknowledged.